Ultimate Guide to Expanding Your Business with Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing is one of the most important forms of digital marketing. It’s safe to say that it is more than a trend or a buzzword, but the most modern form of marketing, however, it is still so misunderstood. 

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a new wave of digital marketing that uses traditional word-of-mouth techniques through social media content. This can mean celebrity endorsements on social media or curated content campaigns. The reason why influencer marketing is so impactful is because it builds relationships between brands and influencers that are organic and authentic. 

This means that their audience is authentic which means that their followers will have genuine interest in what they post. Whether you use influencer marketing services to boost your sales or grow your audience’s perception, the world of influencer marketing is continuing to change and become more complex, making it difficult to keep up to date for the industry and businesses.

The one prediction we can confidently make about influencer marketing services is that they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Social media is more than a form of communication, but a network that connects anyone who is a consumer. This is why influencer marketing will always create new opportunities for any industry.

Partnering with influencers and building a social media campaign can formulate a variety of results, which is why it is important to take time in picking the right influencer to represent your brand. For any brand that’s thinking of using social media marketing, it is important to build brand awareness. Once you are present on social media, your key objective may be to build a stronger audience or engagement, which is why we offer unique influencer marketing services that cater to your specific business needs.

If you are curating a specific campaign with a message that’s focused on advocacy or trending conversation, you may consider focusing on building a strong and loyal with your customers. Outlining your objectives is the first step in creating a social media strategy. This will help you understand which data you need to collect and which results you should assess. This could range from working with micro-influencers or other relationships that have had the greatest success.

In order to plan the right strategy, it is key to be as precise as possible. This begins with understanding who your target audience is, and thinking of the best ways they will engage with your content. Usually, the best engagement comes organically which is why it is crucial to spend time thinking of the behaviours your target audience will have. We are just as driven by results as your business is, which is why we are meticulous about the influencers who we work with. 

Having the opportunity to combine celebrity endorsement with social media and the global marketplace is what makes influencer marketing so effective. Influencer marketing fuses traditional marketing concepts with new digital ideas. Another key factor to influencer marketing is focusing on building strong relationships between the chosen influencer and client.

How your business can benefit from Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a priority to most brands that use social media because it provides endless benefits such as: 

1. Reaching a bigger and new audience 
2. Builds trust between your brand and customers 
3. Grows your social followings 
4. Increases your pages’ traffic 
5. New leads for collaboration and sales

There’s no deep science behind influencer marketing. If a celebrity or someone of influence who you admire is wearing or using a product, you are more likely to be interested in it. Influencers have hundreds to thousands of followers across all different social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok or Youtube. These people have professionally built an audience who they engage with, hence the name ‘influencers’. Building a social media following is not easy. This is why platforms like YouTube and Facebook pay influencers lots of money, because an organic audience is very valuable.

How to start using influencer marketing

Once you find an influencer you want to work with, it makes the most sense to pay them directly for sponsored posts. For example, if their main platform is Instagram, think of how you can display your brand in a grid post for the influencer to upload on their own feed. This kind of ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing is not specific to large companies. Any size business can benefit from influencer marketing. You don’t necessarily need to choose influencers who have millions of followers. On average, influencers get paid hundreds to thousands of dollars to post. Sometimes, micro-influencers are more successful.

What is a micro-influencer?

It’s safe to say that influencer marketing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Since the world of influencer marketing has become so oversaturated, it is not always a clear process to define success. Sometimes if an influencer has hundreds-of-thousands of followers, they are deemed a celebrity which isn’t as easy to relate to. 

Being influenced to buy something online is a lot easier when we trust the opinion of the seller, for example, we are more likely to trust our friends than a celebrity we know we cannot relate to. This has created a unique space in the market for influencers who have a smaller following, which is more relatable. These influencers are called micro-influencers. Micro-influencers are people who can be relatable through their ‘everyday life’ content. Usually they have a following that isn’t based on high numbers but is subjected to a particular niche. 

 What makes micro-influencers so useful when it comes to digital marketing is that they are relatable. It is a modern way of word-of-mouth marketing that has no limits.

Micro-influencers can have fewer than 10,000 followers on all different platforms from Instagram to Facebook or YouTube. The versatility that comes with Influencer marketing is what makes it a perfect foundation for many direct-to-consumer social media strategies. 

Studies even show that merely 70% of millennials are influenced by their peers when it comes to consuming. Another bonus about micro-influencers is that there are so many of them, which means endless opportunities for any industry. This will help you define your niche and identify your community.

Here are the specific steps we recommend when trying to find the right micro-influencers:

1. Outline key marketing objectives

Outlining your key marketing objectives is always the first and most important step to influencer marketing. A social media campaign can have endless results, so it’s more important to focus on the kind of influencer that is spearheading your campaign. Decide on whether or not the most important objective is sales or brand awareness, or maybe it’s building awareness about a particular trending topic.

2. Visualize the campaign you’d like to run 

Next, it is important to decide on which type of campaign you want to run to find the kind of micro-influencers you want to work with. Here are different types of social media campaigns: 

1. Gifting: giving influencers gifts in exchange for branded content 
2. Sponsored content: hiring an influencer to curate your branded content 
3. Giveaways: coming up with a unique incentive that will mention your branded content and gain followers who are interested in getting involved 
4. Takeovers: Guest posting and allowing an influencer to run or write for your social media channels 
5. Discount codes: giving away discount codes through influencer marketing to build brand awareness and audience 
6. Affiliate marketing: using different affiliate codes to get followers involved in your brand, through an influencer who can earn money each time someone buys though their platform 
7. Brand ambassadors: deciding on a partnership with an particular influencer who will promote your products or brand regularly in exchange for certain perks

3. Know your niche 

Knowing your niche means knowing what is being said about it. This is why we recommend setting up a new alert (can be on google) for any industry related news, to see who is already talking about your niche.  Researching online forums and different tags will also help you find people who are already posting about your industry. It’s a good idea to start with popular accounts in your industry when thinking of building brand awareness since they have the biggest audience. Seeing how your competitors are approaching micro-influencer marketing can also help lead to finding the right accounts to monitor or reach-out to. If there’s an influencer who is already interested in your competitor, the chances that they will be interested in your brand are higher.

4. See who your audience is already following 

The right influencers don’t necessarily have to be tied to your industry. Networking with influencers within industries that overlap yours will help your brand reach a whole new audience. Building a SWOT or target analysis is another great way to see who is saying what about your niche, and understand your audience’s needs. It’s also important to look and keep track of other sites that your audience is visiting to develop your own data and research, which will help build your own reach and find new influencers in and outside of your niche. This could create a new opportunity to find a digital space that your competitors might not be present in yet.

5. Use hashtags and keyword searches

Exploring your own hashtags or keywords is also crucial because most social media platforms have their own search engine. You never know who may come across your page, simply by using any hashtag on your profile that relates to your brand’s messaging. This could lead to new customers or influencers looking to work with your brand. Create a list of keywords that coincide with your brand, and monitor them routinely. Make sure the list of keywords is specific and another useful tip is to go through the posts that have the highest engagement and see what king of discussions are already going on within your niche.

Influencer Agencies and Micro-Influencers

Influener marketing agencies use micro-influencing services to curate effective social media campaigns. We at Socially Powerful use strategies catered to your brand that are not a part of any third-party talent, to ensure that our success is authentic and based on metrics and data. We also combine different social media marketing services to form an effective and successful digital marketing campaign. . Community managing services are also very beneficial when it comes to monitoring and curating micro-influencer campaigns. 

Micro-influencers are an effective approach to social media marketing that guarantees results. Organic content is much more likely to be engaged with by audiences than commercial content, it fits into feeds more effortlessly. ‘Real-life’ situations make for better selling opportunities.

Most importantly, influencer marketing can be successful for a brand of any size, and any budget. Whether you are looking for top celebrity endorsements or micro-influencing, influencer marketing can speak to any audience and grow any business online.

Our Influencer marketing agency and Social agency are located worldwide, with our agency network based in the USA, UK, UAE and China.

If you want to receive our industry insights, visit our Influencer Marketing & Social Media blogs here.

@ Socially Powerful

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